Senior Forensic Scientist Mary Hong, with the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, uses a Crime-Lite alternate light source machine. It is used primarily to detect semen in fibers.

Senior Forensic Scientist Mary Hong, with the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, is reflected in a Tecan-Te-Shake, DNA extraction machine. Samples from 30 to 40 case are put into the machine during a two to three hour process of getting the DNA out of cells taken from samples at crime scenes.

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A microscope shows sperm cells stained red to show up on a slide at the Brad Gates Forensics Science Center Crime Lab.

A blue light, the most efficient frequency, is used to highlight body fluids on material at the Brad Gates Forensic Science Center crime lab.

James Lynn Brown was identified as the suspect in the 1978 rape and murder of Lynda Susan Saunders and the shooting of Michael Scott Reynolds.

Lynda Susan Saunders, 26, was raped and murdered in 1978.

Michael Scott Reynolds, 28, was shot in the back of the head in 1978 but survived.

SANTA ANA – A man who never knew his father was the missing link Santa Ana cold-case detectives needed to solve the apparent sexual assault and murder of a young mother and the shooting of her friend in 1978.

The case was solved earlier this month using DNA taken from crime scenes to identify family members of a suspected criminal.

California is one of three states that permit the technique, called familial searching. It has led to the 2010 arrest of a man suspected of being the “Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for two decades, and the 2011 arrest of a young man linked to the sexual assault of a woman at a coffee shop near the Santa Cruz Harbor.

The Santa Ana case marks the first time familial DNA has led to an Orange County crime being solved.

Mary Hong, a forensic scientist at the Orange County Crime Lab in Santa Ana, has been trying to solve the homicide of then 26-year-old Lynda Susan Saunders since 1996, when she developed a DNA profile of the perpetrator using semen left on the victim.

In the early 2000s, Hong retested the evidence using new DNA technology that provided a better identification of the suspect. The DNA profile was sent to the California Department of Justice’s data bank and to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, but there was no match.

The decades-old sexual assault and killing of Saunders and shooting of her friend, Michael Scott Reynolds, then 28, went cold. But in 2006, the Santa Ana Police Department’s Cold Case Unit was formed to review more than 250 unsolved deaths.

Saunders and Reynolds, both managers at a Fiddlers Three Restaurant in Tustin, were attacked July 9, 1978, during a possible robbery.

While Saunders and Reynolds were sitting in a car, someone walked up from behind and demanded Reynolds’ wallet. As Reynolds reached into his coat pocket, he was shot in the back of the head, Santa Ana police Detective Domingo Cabrera said. He survived.

Saunders ran from the car and was chased. Her body was found behind a nearby liquor store. She had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest and head injuries and had been sexually assaulted.

With no leads in more than 30 years, cold-case detectives met with prosecutors in July 2010 and requested authorization to use family DNA in their investigation.

California limits familial searches to sexual assaults and homicides where there is a serious risk to public safety and all other investigative leads have been exhausted, said Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Justice.

The Saunders killing met the requirements.

Information developed from the state’s familial search program suggested a man with a criminal history was a relative of the source of the DNA found at the scene.

Detectives tracked down that man, who had a brother named James Lynn Brown. Brown had a son, who willingly gave a DNA sample to Hong.

The DNA produced a family match with the semen left on Saunders.

Brown’s son, who does not have a criminal record, was shocked and saddened when he learned the results pointed to his father.

“The son seems to be a decent family guy,” said Sgt. John Wooding, who leads the Santa Ana police homicide unit. “His parents divorced when he was young and (he) never met his father.”

But detectives could not make an arrest. Brown, who had a criminal history that included assaults, robberies and burglaries, committed suicide in 1996.

“This case would not have been solved without the familial searches because the suspect is deceased and his DNA sample never went into the database,” Hong said.

Critics of the crime-solving tool say it raises serious privacy and constitutional issues.

“One of my concerns is that the Legislature has not looked at the issue and decided to authorize it, so we have the search procedures conducted based on a memo that the Department of Justice developed,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

Risher added that familial searching omits important safeguards, including the requirement for a search warrant.

Gregory says the department has imposed multiple conditions that must be met before it will release the identity of an offender in the DNA databank who may be the relative of the actual perpetrator.

“We believe that by establishing a strict protocol that is designed to narrow down the candidate pool and respect the privacy of individuals, we can perform familial searches in a manner that balances the rights of individuals with society’s interest in solving crimes,” Gregory said.

Hong says at least 10 other Orange County cases have been submitted to the Department of Justice for familial DNA searches. The results of those are pending.

Denisse Salazar covered the cities of Placentia and Yorba Linda for the Orange County Register. Over the years, she also covered crime, courts, human trafficking and breaking news, such as team coverage of Orange County’s worst mass killing, which won first place in online breaking news from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (2011). Salazar has won awards from the Orange County Press Club. She graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a bachelor's degree in communications with an emphasis in journalism and a minor in Spanish. She earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from USC.